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The day I found my smile again was when I stood in my own storm and danced with my tribe.
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Shannon L. Alder
“
If the family you chose before your birth no longer supports your path towards fulfilling your true destiny, it is never too late to find a new tribe.
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Anthon St. Maarten
“
Plenty of people will think you're crazy, no matter what you do. Don't let that stop you from finding the people who think you're incredible—the ones who need to hear your voice, because it reminds them of their own. Your tribe. They're out there. Don’t let your critics interfere with your search for them.
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Vironika Tugaleva
“
So, then, now you know your task: to become what the gods want, not what your parents want, not what your tribe wants, but what the gods want, and what your psyche will support if consciousness so directs.
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James Hollis (What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life)
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Successful heretics create their own religions....You can recognize the need for faith in your idea, you can find the tribe you need to support you, and yes, you can create a new religion around your faith. Steve Jobs did it on purpose at Apple and Phil Knight is famous for doing it at Nike.
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Seth Godin (Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us)
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We want lovers, friends, recruits, soldiers, and affiliations that support who we are. People, individuals, believe in themselves, want to survive, and on a Darwinistic level at least, want to have more, of ourselves. Initially, this is a visual choice. The where, what, when, and who…to our why. Upon closer inspection, which is the upfall of the politically correct culture of today, we learn to measure people on the competence of their values that we most value. When we do this, the politics of gender, race, and slanderous slang take a back seat to the importance of the values we share. The more we travel, the more we realize how similar our human needs are. We want to be loved, have a family, community, have something to look forward to. These basic needs are present in all socioeconomic and cultural civilizations. I have seen many tribes in the deserts of Northern Africa who, with nine children and no electricity, had more joy, love, honor, and laughter than the majority of the most materially rich people I’ve ever met. We have the choice to love, befriend, recruit, call to arms, associate, and support who we believe in, and more importantly, who, we believe, believes in us.
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Matthew McConaughey (Greenlights)
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Finally, at age seventy, Goodman was able to get the diagnosis and access to services he needed. Joining a support group for adults run by the Asperger’s Association of New England, he says, was “like coming ashore after a life of bobbing up and down in a sea that seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions.
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Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
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After a stressful event, we often crave comfort food. Our body is calling for more glucose and simple carbohydrates and fat... And in modern life, people tend to have fewer friends and less support, because there's no tribe. Being alone is not good for the brain.
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John J. Ratey (Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain)
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Your faith reveals the master who already lives within you when you believe that you can directly commune with us to receive our blessings, divine interventions, soul initiations, DNA activations, emotional support, and personal coaching across multiple planes of reality.
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Kaia Ra (The Sophia Code: A Living Transmission from The Sophia Dragon Tribe)
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The position of women, over the years, has definitely changed for the worse. we women have behaved like mugs, We have clamoured to be allowed to work as men work. Men, not being fools, have taken kindly to the idea. Why supoort a wife? What's wrong with a wife supporting herself? She wants to do it. By golly, she can go on doing it!
it seems sad that having established ourselves so cleverly as the "weaker sex" we should now be broadly on a par with the women of primitive tribes who toil in the fields all day, walk miles to gather camelthorn for fuel, and on trek carry all the pots, pans, and household equipment on their heads, while the gorgeous, ornamental male sweeps on ahead, unburdened save for one lethal weapon with which to defend his women.
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Agatha Christie (Agatha Christie: An Autobiography)
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Tribalism is more powerful and dangerous than any political party. People choose to follow and support someone, not because they are good as leaders or they have good credibility, But is because they are from the same tribe .
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D.J. Kyos
“
Thousands of years ago tribes of human beings suffered great privations in the struggle to survive. In this struggle it was important not only to be able to handle a club, but also to possess the ability to think reasonably, to take care of the knowledge and experience garnered by the tribe, and to develop the links that would provide cooperation with other tribes. Today the entire human race is faced with a similar test. In infinite space many civilizations are bound to exist, among them civilizations that are also wiser and more "successful" than ours. I support the cosmological hypothesis which states that the development of the universe is repeated in its basic features an infinite number of times. In accordance with this, other civilizations, including more "successful" ones, should exist an infinite number of times on the "preceding" and the "following" pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet this should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world of ours, where, like faint glimmers of light in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of dark unconsciousness of material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.
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Andrei D. Sakharov
“
Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.
We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.
And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.
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Catherynne M. Valente
“
Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.
And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.
Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...
...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.
It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.
'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality)
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Each of the five tribes of machine learning has its own master algorithm, a general-purpose learner that you can in principle use to discover knowledge from data in any domain. The symbolists’ master algorithm is inverse deduction, the connectionists’ is backpropagation, the evolutionaries’ is genetic programming, the Bayesians’ is Bayesian inference, and the analogizers’ is the support vector machine.
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Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
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In this epistemic approach, Roberts said, "Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe's values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders.
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Sarah McCammon (The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church)
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What this means is that the converse is also true. A supportive and well-managed work environment is good for one’s health. Those who feel they have more control, who feel empowered to make decisions instead of waiting for approval, suffer less stress. Those only doing as they are told, always forced to follow the rules, are the ones who suffer the most. Our feelings of control, stress, and our ability to perform at our best are all directly tied to how safe we feel in our organizations. Feeling unsafe around those we expect to feel safe—those in our tribes (work is the modern version of the tribe)—fundamentally violates the laws of nature and how we were designed to live.
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Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't)
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We are the crazy, cool cancer misfits trying to find our way after the terrible trauma of treatment. We are everywhere. We are a tribe without even knowing it.
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Saskia Lightstar (The Cancer Misfit: A Guide to Navigating Life After Treatment)
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Your personal passion to radically serve humanity’s ascension is mirrored in our own collective desire to wholly support you in this lifetime.
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Kaia Ra (The Sophia Code: A Living Transmission from The Sophia Dragon Tribe)
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That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword—the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men—stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica.
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Winston S. Churchill (The Story of the Malakand Field force)
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It is not true that we only get to choose our friends, but not our family. We actually choose our families before birth. It is part of our spiritual life plan before we arrive on this planet. And as that plan unfolds, some of us will be blessed with abundant love and support from our families, while others will not. Either way, it will all be part of our original plan. Because sometimes we need a lousy family to get us started on our journey towards personal growth, success and spiritual fulfillment. But if someday you reach a tipping point, where the lack of family love and support no longer serves your path towards fulfilling your true destiny... it is never too late to find a new tribe. Sometimes a life plan also demands that we choose our families more than once in a lifetime.
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Anthon St. Maarten
“
The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy. Bands and tribes already had supernatural beliefs, just as do modern established religions. But the supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion. Hawaiian chiefs were typical of chiefs elsewhere, in asserting divinity, divine descent, or at least a hotline to the gods. The chief claimed to serve the people by interceding for them with the gods and reciting the ritual formulas required to obtain rain, good harvests, and success in fishing.
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel (Civilizations Rise and Fall, #1))
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There is a lamp outside the church, the lamp they light for the services. There are women of the church sitting on the red earth under the lamp; they are dressed in white dresses, each with a green cloth about her neck. They rise when the party approaches, and one breaks into a hymn, with a high note that cannot be sustained; but others come in underneath it, and support and sustain it, and some men come in too, with the deep notes and the true. Kumalo takes off his hat and he and his wife and his friend join in also, while the girl stands and watches in wonder. It is a hymn of thanksgiving, and man remembers God in it, and prostrates himself and gives thanks for the Everlasting Mercy. And it echoes in the bare red hills and over the bare red fields of the broken tribe. And it is sung in love and humility and gratitude, and the humble simple people pour their lives into the song.
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Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country)
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On the farm, having children was often more an economic decision than it was about love. Children were free labor that were de facto chained to their parents’ economic needs. There was an understanding—rooted in millennia of cultural and economic norms—that children would either take over the farm as their parents aged, or at least not move all that far away. The extended family formed a tribe that consistently supported one another. This cultural-economic dynamic has held true since the dawn of recorded history, even to and through the consolidation of the world into empires and nation-states.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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Even when arguing opinions, you may be surprised how potent a rational perspective can be. When illuminated by it, you fast discover that Earth supports not many tribes, but only one—the human tribe. That’s when many disagreements soften, while others simply evaporate, leaving you with nothing to argue about in the first place.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
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This is a problem because, while the urban tribe may be the most supportive figures in our twenties, they are not the most transformative. The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know—those who never make it into our tribe—who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.
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Meg Jay (The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now)
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After discovering that he and his sons were on the spectrum, Hedin joined the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (GRASP), one of the largest support groups for people with autism in the United States. Looking back, he feels certain that a number of hams he knew in the course of fifty-five years of surfing the airwaves would have qualified for a diagnosis.
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Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
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Of the scaly tribe I may mention those suckers belonging to the body loaferish, that ever rise to the surface of respectability, but are always groveling in the mud of corruption, whose sole study appears to be how much they can get without the least physical exertion; and who would rather ride to hell in a hand-cart than walk to heaven supported by the staff of industry.
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Elbridge Gerry Paige (Short Patent Sermons Volume 1)
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By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a grey-hound, or a grey-hound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd's dog. Those different tribes of animals, however, though all of the same species are of scarce any use to one another. The strength of the mastiff is not in the least supported either by the swiftness of the greyhound, or by the sagacity of the spaniel, or by the docility of the shepherd's dog. The effects of those different geniuses and talents, for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better accommodation and conveniency of the species. Each animal is still obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently, and derives no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with which nature has distinguished its fellows. Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men's talents he has occasion for.
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Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations)
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The investigating officer, Col. George Nauman, went to Fort Yuma, verified that Burke had never entertained — much less refused — such a proposal, and the two sent runners out to local tribes promising ransoms for the white captives. Word arrived that one of the girls, probably Mary Ann, had died, and Lorenzo, with the support of his neighbors in El Monte, petitioned Governor J. Neely Johnson in Sacramento, asking for help in rescuing Olive.
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Margot Mifflin (The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West))
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Northern European societies are among the few where people sleep alone or with a partner in a private room, and that may have significant implications for mental health in general and for PTSD in particular. Virtually all mammals seem to benefit from companionship; even lab rats recover more quickly from trauma if they are caged with other rats rather than alone. In humans, lack of social support has been found to be twice as reliable at predicting PTSD as the severity of the trauma itself.
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
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In addition to regular stand-ups with squads, product owners, IT-area leads, and chapter leads, the tribe lead also regularly visits the squads to ask questions—not the traditional questions like “Why isn’t this getting done?” but, rather, “Help me better understand the problems you’re encountering,” “Help me see what you’re learning,” and “What can I do to better support you and the team?” This kind of coaching behavior does not come easily to some leaders and managers. It takes real effort,
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Nicole Forsgren (Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations)
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The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy. Bands and tribes already had supernatural beliefs, just as do modern established religions. But the supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion.
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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Except when he feels enthusiasm for a leader, the voter in a large democracy has so little sense of power that he often does not think it worth while to use his vote. If he is not a keen propagandist for one of the parties, the vastness of the forces that decide who shall govern makes his own part in them appear completely negligible. In practice, all that he can do, as a rule, is to vote for one or other of two men, whose programmes may not interest him, and may differ very little, and who, he knows, may with impunity abandon their programmes as soon as they are elected. If, on the other hand, there is a leader whom he enthusiastically admires, the psychology involved is that which we considered in connection with monarchy: it is that of the tie between a king and the tribe or sect of his active supporters. Every skilful political agitator or organiser devotes himself to stimulating devotion to an individual. If the individual is a great leader, the result is one-man government; if he is not, the caucus which has secured his election becomes the real power.
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Bertrand Russell (Power: A New Social Analysis (Routledge Classics))
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In reality, Kabila was no more than a petty tyrant propelled to prominence by accident. Secretive and paranoid, he had no political programme, no strategic vision and no experience of running a government. He refused to engage with established opposition groups or with civic organisations and banned political parties. Lacking a political organisation of his own, he surrounded himself with friends and family members and relied heavily for support and protection on Rwanda and Banyamulenge. Two key ministries were awarded to cousins; the new chief of staff of the army, James Kabarebe, was a Rwandan Tutsi who had grown up in Uganda; the deputy chief of staff and commander of land forces was his 26-year-old son, Joseph; the national police chief was a brother-in-law. Whereas Mobutu had packed his administration with supporters from his home province of Équateur, Kabila handed out key positions in government, the armed forces, security services and public companies to fellow Swahili-speaking Katangese, notably members of the Lubakat group of northern Katanga, his father’s tribe.
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Martin Meredith (The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence)
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You have the inspiration of a jester, the soul of a backpacker and the heart of a warrior, and you’ve already done much better than you appreciate. You’re supported more than you realise. You’re in spitting distance now, just around the corner
Each and every one of you is a work of art. Not everyone’s going to accept you, but the ones who do will never forget you. Come on, admit it, you’re not like the others, are you? And that’s not just okay, it’s fucking beautiful!
Always remember, when you’re stuck between two planets, the only thing you can do is try something absurd.
….. And you may just hear a river start.
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Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
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FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CIVILIZATION.—Among savage tribes there is a certain category of customs which appear to aim at nothing but custom. They therefore lay down strict, and, on the whole, superfluous regulations (e.g. the rules of the Kamchadals, which forbid snow to be scraped off the boots with a knife, coal to be stuck on the point of a knife, or a piece of iron to be put into the fire—and death to be the portion of every one who shall act contrariwise!) Yet these laws serve to keep people continually reminded of the custom, and the imperative necessity on their parts to conform to it: and all this in support of the great principle which stands at the beginning of all civilization: any custom is better than none.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality)
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Aren’t you going to tell her that even among the remotest tribes in the Amazon, sexual relations between family members is absolutely forbidden?! That, after all, is what the girl really needed. That’s what all the patients filling the tent and waiting on line outside needed. To be told what’s good and what’s bad. And you people, instead of telling them that, say that bad is also good and good is also bad. So yes, they leave the tent with a spring in their step. Someone listened to them without judging them. Someone supported them. Wonderful. We all want to be supported. But the next morning, the unsolved moral dilemma will return to torment them, and this time with greater intensity, because now it’s out in the open.
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Eshkol Nevo (Three Floors Up)
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The tribal ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage, burial, installation, and so forth, serve to translate the individual's life-crises and life-deeds into classic, impersonal forms. They disclose him to himself, not as this personality or that, but as the warrior, the bride, the widow, the priest, the chieftain; at the same time rehearsing for the rest of the community the old lesson of the archetypal stages. All participate in the ceremonial according to rank and function. The whole society becomes visible to itself as an imperishable living unit. Generations of individuals pass, like anonymous cells from a living body; but the sustaining, timeless form remains. By an enlargement of vision to embrace this superindividual, each discovers himself enhanced, enriched, supported, and magnified. His role, however unimpressive, is seen to be intrinsic to the beautiful festival-image of man—the image, potential yet necessarily inhibited, within himself.
Social duties continue the lesson of the festival into normal, everyday existence, and the individual is validated still. Conversely, indifference, revolt—or exile—break the vitalizing connectives. From the standpoint of the social unit, the broken-off individual is simply nothing—waste. Whereas the man or woman who can honestly say that he or she has lived the role—whether that of priest, harlot, queen, or slave—is something in the full sense of the verb to be.
Rites of initiation and installation, then, teach the lesson of the essential oneness of the individual and the group; seasonal festivals open a larger horizon. As the individual is an organ of society, so is the tribe or city—so is humanity entire—only a phase of the mighty organism of the cosmos.
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Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces)
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In all cultures, ceremonies are designed to communicate the experience of one group of people to the wider community. When people bury loved ones, when they wed, when they graduate from college, the respective ceremonies communicate something essential to the people who are watching... if contemporary America doesn’t develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves... ...Offer veterans all over the country the use of their town hall every Veteran’s Day to speak freely about their experience at war... A community ceremony like that would finally return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought. The bland phrase “I support the troops” would then mean showing up at the town hall once a year to hear these people out.
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
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Paleolithic communities had probably been egalitarian because hunter-gathers could not support a privileged class that did not share the hardship and danger of the hunt. Because these small communities lived at near-subsistence level and produced no economic surplus, inequity of wealth was impossible. The tribe could survive only if everybody shared what food they had. Government by coercion was not feasible because all able-bodied males had exactly the same weapons and fighting skills. Anthropologists have noted that modern hunter-gatherer societies are classless, that their economy is "a sort of communism," and that people are honored for skills and qualities, such as generosity, kindness, and even-temperedness, that benefit the community as a whole. But in societies that produce more than they need, it is possible for a small group to exploit this surplus for its own enrichment, gain a monopoly of violence, dominate the rest of the population.
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Karen Armstrong (Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence)
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It is like that moment depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where the hands of God and man are about to touch. It's just at the moment when the despair is greatest, when we reach up, that the grace descends, and we experience the knowledge or the insight or the remembrance that it all isn't in fact the way we thought it was. If it happens too violently, we decide you've gone insane. And there are people who are all too willing to reassure us that we have, and there are places for that. In hunting tribes, mystics are treated as insane--they're an inconvenience because the tribe has to be kept mobile and old people and crazy people have to be put away somewhere. But if we're in a certain position at the moment of seeing through, if the view has been gentle or if we're with somebody else that knows, or if we had intellectually known but didn't believe, all of which is a karmic matter, if we had some kind of structure or support system, we says, "Even though everybody else thinks I'm mad, I'm not.
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Ram Dass (Grist for the Mill: The Mellow Drama, Dying: An Opportunity for Awakening, Freeing the Mind, Karmuppance, God & Beyond)
“
The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
“
The main ones are the symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, Bayesians, and analogizers. Each tribe has a set of core beliefs, and a particular problem that it cares most about. It has found a solution to that problem, based on ideas from its allied fields of science, and it has a master algorithm that embodies it. For symbolists, all intelligence can be reduced to manipulating symbols, in the same way that a mathematician solves equations by replacing expressions by other expressions. Symbolists understand that you can’t learn from scratch: you need some initial knowledge to go with the data. They’ve figured out how to incorporate preexisting knowledge into learning, and how to combine different pieces of knowledge on the fly in order to solve new problems. Their master algorithm is inverse deduction, which figures out what knowledge is missing in order to make a deduction go through, and then makes it as general as possible. For connectionists, learning is what the brain does, and so what we need to do is reverse engineer it. The brain learns by adjusting the strengths of connections between neurons, and the crucial problem is figuring out which connections are to blame for which errors and changing them accordingly. The connectionists’ master algorithm is backpropagation, which compares a system’s output with the desired one and then successively changes the connections in layer after layer of neurons so as to bring the output closer to what it should be. Evolutionaries believe that the mother of all learning is natural selection. If it made us, it can make anything, and all we need to do is simulate it on the computer. The key problem that evolutionaries solve is learning structure: not just adjusting parameters, like backpropagation does, but creating the brain that those adjustments can then fine-tune. The evolutionaries’ master algorithm is genetic programming, which mates and evolves computer programs in the same way that nature mates and evolves organisms. Bayesians are concerned above all with uncertainty. All learned knowledge is uncertain, and learning itself is a form of uncertain inference. The problem then becomes how to deal with noisy, incomplete, and even contradictory information without falling apart. The solution is probabilistic inference, and the master algorithm is Bayes’ theorem and its derivates. Bayes’ theorem tells us how to incorporate new evidence into our beliefs, and probabilistic inference algorithms do that as efficiently as possible. For analogizers, the key to learning is recognizing similarities between situations and thereby inferring other similarities. If two patients have similar symptoms, perhaps they have the same disease. The key problem is judging how similar two things are. The analogizers’ master algorithm is the support vector machine, which figures out which experiences to remember and how to combine them to make new predictions.
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Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
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These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the ground-nut (Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian› s God in the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe.
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Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
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[E]ven on the issues that are put up to democratic vote, we are saddled with a two-party system in which the liberal democratic party might be one of the most criminal orginizations in modern history. If you think I am exaggerating, consider that it's the democrats who: Fought the civil war on the side of slavery, created Jim Crow segregation after they lost that war, dropped the only nuclear weapons on a civilian population in history, stole a third of Mexico's land, and forced the Cherokee and other tribes on the infamous Trail of Tears, killed millions in the wars of Korea and South East Asia, doubled the country's prison population under Bill Clinton, deported over 2 million immigrants under Barrack, you get the picture. The point is not that there's anything better about Republicans: Many of whom probably look at the list above and sigh with envy, but that both major US parties are completely devoted to the priorities of the tiny class that runs this country. Each party may be paid to look out for a particular industry, republicans get lots of oil money, while democrats are preferred by the tech industry. But sometimes they propose different strategies to achieve the same ends: such as whether the United States should destroy Middle-Eastern countries with or without the approval of the United Nations. More often, their differences are even less substantial and are almost entirely about how to get a different voting block to support the same policies.
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Danny Katch (Socialism…Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation)
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We want lovers, friends, recruits, soldiers, and affiliations that support who we are. People, individuals, believe in themselves, want to survive, and on a Darwinistic level at least, want to have more, of ourselves. Initially, this is a visual choice. The where, what, when, and who…to our why. Upon closer inspection, which is the upfall of the politically correct culture of today, we learn to measure people on the competence of their values that we most value. When we do this, the politics of gender, race, and slanderous slang take a back seat to the importance of the values we share. The more we travel, the more we realize how similar our human needs are. We want to be loved, have a family, community, have something to look forward to. These basic needs are present in all socioeconomic and cultural civilizations. I have seen many tribes in the deserts of Northern Africa who, with nine children and no electricity, had more joy, love, honor, and laughter than the majority of the most materially rich people I’ve ever met. We have the choice to love, befriend, recruit, call to arms, associate, and support who we believe in, and more importantly, who, we believe, believes in us. I think that’s what we all want. To believe in and be believed in. We all must earn belief in ourselves first, then for each other. Earn it with you, then earn it with me, then we earn it for we. Travel and humanity have been my greatest educators. They have helped me understand the common denominator of mankind. Values. Engage with yourself then engage with the world. Values travel. And sometimes we get a stamp in our passport just by crossing the street.
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Matthew McConaughey (Greenlights)
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Despite the superficial similarities created by global technology, the dynamics of peer-orientation are more likely to promote division rather than a healthy universality. One need only to look at the extreme tribalization of the youth gangs, the social forms entered into by the most peer-oriented among our children. Seeking to be the same as someone else immediately triggers the need to be different from others. As the similarities within the chosen group strengthen, the differences from those outside the groups are accentuated to the point of hostility.
Each group is solidified and reinforced by mutual emulation and cue-taking. In this way, tribes have formed spontaneously since the beginning of time. The crucial difference is that traditional tribal culture could be passed down, whereas these tribes of today are defined and limited by barriers among the generations. The school milieu is rife with such dynamics. When immature children cut off from their adult moorings mingle with one another, groups soon form spontaneously, often along the more obvious dividing lines of grade and gender and race.
Within these larger groupings certain subcultures emerge: sometimes along the lines of dress and appearance, and sometimes along those of shared interests, attitudes, or abilities, as in groups of jocks, brains, and computer nerds. Sometimes they form among peer-oriented subcultures like skateboarders, bikers, and skinheads. Many of these subcultures are reinforced and shaped by the media and supported by cult costumes, symbols, movies, music, and language. If the tip of the peer-orientation iceberg are the gangs and the gang wannabes, at the base are the cliques.
Immature beings revolving around one another invent their own language and modes of expression that impoverish their self-expression and cut them off from others. Such phenomena may have appeared before, of course, but not nearly to the same extent we are witnessing today. The result is tribalization.
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Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
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The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past. So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.
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Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
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By the time Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somalia on October 25, 2011, the twenty-four boys back in America who had been so young during the 1993 attack on the downed American aid support choppers in Mogadishu had since grown to manhood. Now they were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and each one had become determined to qualify for the elite U.S. Navy unit called DEVGRU. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy and undergoing their essential basic training, every one of them endured the challenges of BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, where the happy goal is to become “drownproofed” via what amounts to repeated semidrowning, while also learning dozens of ways to deliver explosive death and demolition. This was only the starting point.
Once qualification was over and the candidates were sworn in, three-fourths of the qualified Navy SEALS who tried to also qualify for DEVGRU dropped out. Those super-warriors were overcome by the challenges, regardless of their peak physical condition and being in the prime of their lives. This happened because of the intensity of the training. Long study and practice went into developing a program specifically designed to seek out and expose any individual’s weakest points.
If the same ordeals were imposed on captured terrorists who were known to be guilty of killing innocent civilians, the officers in charge would get thrown in the brig. Still, no matter how many Herculean physical challenges are presented to a DEVGRU candidate, the brutal training is primarily mental. It reveals each soldier’s principal foe to be himself. His mortal fears and deepest survival instinct emerge time after time as the essential demons he must overcome.
Each DEVGRU member must reach beyond mere proficiency at dealing death. He must become two fighters combined: one who is trained to a state of robotic muscle memory in specific dark skills, and a second who is fluidly adaptive, using an array of standard SEAL tactics. Only when he can live and work from within this state of mind will he be trusted to pursue black operations in every form of hostile environment.
Therefore the minority candidate who passes into DEVGRU becomes a member of the “Tier One” Special Mission Unit. He will be assigned to reconnaissance or assault, but his greatest specialty will always be to remain lethal in spite of rapidly changing conditions. From the day he is accepted into that elite tribe, he embodies what is delicately called “preemptive and proactive counterterrorist operations.” Or as it might be more bluntly described: Hunt them down and kill them wherever they are - and is possible, blow up something.
Each one of that small percentage who makes it through six months of well-intended but malicious torture emerges as a true human predator. If removing you from this world becomes his mission, your only hope of escaping a DEVGRU SEAL is to find a hiding place that isn’t on land, on the sea, or in the air.
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Anthony Flacco (Impossible Odds: The Kidnapping of Jessica Buchanan and Her Dramatic Rescue by SEAL Team Six)
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You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.
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James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
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Even the King of Cyprus calls the King of Egypt his brother. But Palestine was admitted to be an Egyptian possession, and the Phoenicians were always energetic supporters of the Egyptian régime against the lawless Bedawîn tribes, who were constantly intriguing with the Kheta or Hittite power to the north against Egypt.
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Leonard William King (History of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia and Assyria in the Light of Recent Discovery)
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Whole villages of Muslims had been hacked to pieces by drunken Christian youth, and as foreigners, we should have been pulled out by the organization. But the U.S. government supported the Christian tribes, just as the French had all through the colonial days, and to pull us out would have meant admitting that things weren't as stable for their puppet government as the western companies, trading in Ivory Coast for cocoa, rubber, and timber, and selling Coke and cigarettes, wanted to hear.
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Tony D'Souza (Whiteman)
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Sheldon Adelson, for example, gave more than $53 million to Super PACs, but all eight of the candidates he supported lost.59 Karl Rove, a strategic mastermind who won fame advising George W. Bush, oversaw groups that spent $175 million and still lost twenty-one out of thirty elections.
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Laurence H. Tribe (Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution)
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In 1904, the American government spent $1.5 million taking thirteen hundred Filipinos from a dozen different tribes to the St. Louis Exposition. The Philippine Reservation became one of the most popular features of the fair, and the Igorrotes drew the largest crowds of all. By displaying the tribespeople in this manner, the US government hoped to gain popular support for its occupation of the Philippines by showing the American public that the Filipinos were innocents, a people far from ready for self-government, and in need of paternalistic American protection.
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Claire Prentice (The Lost Tribe of Coney Island: Headhunters, Luna Park, and the Man Who Pulled Off the Spectacle of the Century)
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During the early hours of April 12, 1980, which for all practical purposes looked no different than any other hot and humid morning in Monrovia. Select members of Liberia’s National Defense Force awoke early and quietly made their way to the small garden in the back of the Presidential Palace on Ashmond Street. Within minutes President Tolbert and twenty-six of his staff were murdered by the rebels called the “People's Redemption Council,”
There are differing stories as to the time and manner of the President’s death; however it is believed that he was disemboweled by Samuel Doe, a member of the Krahn tribe, while asleep in the Executive Mansion. Another report stated that Tolbert was shot and stabbed by an American CIA operative. The First Lady, Tolbert's wife Victoria, wrote in her autobiography that she saw a masked man with a white hand, stabbing her late husband. Because of this evidence it was speculated by many that “white" mercenaries working for the CIA had been behind Doe’s actions. However, Boima Fahnbulleh, a minisiter of Doe’s cabinet, later testified that “the Americans did not support the coup d'état led by Mr. Doe.
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Hank Bracker
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Hospitality is a call to stop being insular. Life often pushes us into friend groups that are all in the same life stage and circumstances. It makes perfect sense to need relationships with people who can understand what you’re going through and support you. I need mom friends I can vent to about never getting a chance to go into the bathroom alone, for instance. (How old do my kids have to be for me to enter that promised land?) But this natural need for commonality can often turn into creating your own little tribe or bubble and missing out on relationships with your brothers and sisters whose lives look very different. Even church programming can cause this by sorting everyone into “young professionals,” “families,” “singles,” “seniors,” and so forth. The truth is that we need one another—everybody.
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Haley Stewart (The Grace of Enough: Pursuing Less and Living More in a Throwaway Culture)
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While waiting for his flight at Coanda airport in Bucharest, Scorpion checked the news on his laptop. In Yemen, fighting had been reported between the Hashidis and a force comprised of AQAP allied with elements of the Bakil and Abidah tribes. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, there had been a massive demonstration in Kiev’s Independence those backing Davydenko and supporters of Iryna Shevchenko, who was calling for a vote of no confidence against Davydenko in the Verkhovna Rada. A Jewish synagogue in Donetsk had been torched, and a gang of Black Armbands killed two Jewish college students in Lviv. “Everybody wins,” Shaefer had said.
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Andrew Kaplan (Scorpion Winter (Scorpion, #3))
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O’Sullivan immediately proposed that the army form into companies of fifty men each, commanded by a captain supported by one lieutenant and four sergeants. But, sadly, this ‘cou’d not be followed, they must go by tribes ; such a chife of a tribe had sixty men, another thirty, another twenty, more or lesse ; they wou’d not mix nor seperat, & wou’d have double officers, [that] is two Captns, & two Lts, to each Company, strong or weak. That’, O’Sullivan pithily observed, ‘was uselesse.’ This irregular, clan-focused arrangement was both a strength and a weakness of this embryonic army.
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Jacqueline Riding (Jacobites: A New History of the '45 Rebellion)
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People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.
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Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson (The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition))
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Lash Tribe
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Trump is a man who polarizes opinion: you suspect that if he said ice cream was a pleasant treat on a sunny day, it would lead some Americans to refuse to eat anything but ice cream while others protested loudly outside ice cream parlors. So it was with COVID. The perverse and reckless refusal ever to wear a mask became a badge of pride for many of Trump’s supporters, while his opponents went to the opposite extreme—I noted one prominent tweet by a liberal American journalist explaining that the UK pandemic was “out of control” because people were not wearing masks as they walked in the park. To British eyes, the tweet just seemed bewildering: the evidence suggests that, mask or no mask, the risk of transmitting the virus while out for a stroll is very low. At the time of the tweet, late in January 2021, UK case numbers weren’t out of control either; they were rapidly falling. The tweet could be understood only as a salvo in a politically polarized battle about responsible mask use in which neither tribe was interested in figuring out the truth. Paradoxically, it can be much easier to spot tribalism at a distance. If you belong to the tribe of Republicans or Democrats, you’re too involved in the battle to think clearly. It is easier when—like your bemused British author—you belong to the tribe of puzzled outsiders.
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Tim Harford (The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics)
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I remember one story, which I have never had verified, but which rings true, concerning a myth belonging to some tribe in Western Australia. In the beginning, the women had everything. They had the power to procreate, they supported the tribe and kept them alive with their knowledge of bush foods, and they had a natural superiority. The also had the 'knowledge' which they kept hidden in a secret cave. The men conspired to steal this knowledge, so that things would be more balanced. (Now here comes the crunch.) The women heard of this, and instead of stopping them, realized that this was the way things had to go, for the sexes to remain in harmony. They allowed the men to steal this 'knowledge' which has remained in their hands until today.
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Robyn Davidson (Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback)
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So long as we continue to be so cowardly as to yield to any preposterous demand on the part of the Moslems to keep up the show of unity and so terribly afraid of Moslems’ discontent as to allow even the integrity of our Motherland to get broken up into pieces, is it not more likely that this very financial and economical starvation of these would-be Moslem states may goad them on to encroach once more on our Hindu provinces and instigated by the religious fanaticism, which is so inflammable in the frontier tribes even now and urged on by the ideal of a Pathanistan under the lead of the organized forces of the Ameer, may threaten to invade you if you do not handover to them the remaining parts of the Punjab right up to Delhi to make them financially and economically self-supporting?
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Vikram Sampath (Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966)
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Pakistan’s “Islam over tribe” approach became a pillar of its policies on the frontier and has characterized its deep involvement in Afghanistan’s conflicts over the last thirty years, including its support for the Haqqani network.
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Vahid Brown (Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012)
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Acquiring additional females of reproductive age has probably always been the most prized outcome of intergroup conflict in the long history of our species... Polygyny was relatively inexpensive for most of that history because acquiring the material ability to support extra wives or mates depended less on first obtaining wealth itself and more on the ability to manipulate male alliances that effectively deployed lethal violence and the threat of lethal violence to this end. Perhaps if we viewed the human ability to harness, control, and prudently deploy violence for reproductive advantage, we could consider this skill the most important of all strategic resources.
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Napoleon A. Chagnon (Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists)
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Niobe earned the ire of the gods by bragging about her seven lovely daughters and seven “handsome sons—whom the easily offended Olympians soon slaughtered for her impertinence. Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river, with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, however, the fruit would be blown away beyond his grasp or the water would recede. Still, while elusiveness and loss tortured Tantalus and Niobe, it is actually a surfeit of their namesake elements that has decimated central Africa.
There’s a good chance you have tantalum or niobium in your pocket right now. Like their periodic table neighbors, both are dense, heat-resistant, noncorrosive metals that hold a charge well—qualities that make them vital for compact cell phones. In the mid-1990s cell phone designers started demanding both metals, especially tantalum, from the world’s largest supplier, the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire. Congo sits next to Rwanda in central Africa, and most of us probably remember the Rwandan butchery of the 1990s. But none of us likely remembers the day in 1996 when the ousted Rwandan government of ethnic Hutus spilled into Congo seeking “refuge. At the time it seemed just to extend the Rwandan conflict a few miles west, but in retrospect it was a brush fire blown right into a decade of accumulated racial kindling. Eventually, nine countries and two hundred ethnic tribes, each with its own ancient alliances and unsettled grudges, were warring in the dense jungles.
Nonetheless, if only major armies had been involved, the Congo conflict likely would have petered out. Larger than Alaska and dense as Brazil, Congo is even less accessible than either by roads, meaning it’s not ideal for waging a protracted war. Plus, poor villagers can’t afford to go off and fight unless there’s money at stake. Enter tantalum, niobium, and cellular technology. Now, I don’t mean to impute direct blame. Clearly, cell phones didn’t cause the war—hatred and grudges did. But just as clearly, the infusion of cash perpetuated the brawl. Congo has 60 percent of the world’s supply of the two metals, which blend together in the ground in a mineral called coltan. Once cell phones caught on—sales rose from virtually zero in 1991 to more than a billion by 2001—the West’s hunger proved as strong as Tantalus’s, and coltan’s price grew tenfold. People purchasing ore for cell phone makers didn’t ask and didn’t care where the coltan came from, and Congolese miners had no idea what the mineral was used for, knowing only that white people paid for it and that they could use the profits to support their favorite militias.
Oddly, tantalum and niobium proved so noxious because coltan was so democratic. Unlike the days when crooked Belgians ran Congo’s diamond and gold mines, no conglomerates controlled coltan, and no backhoes and dump trucks were necessary to mine it. Any commoner with a shovel and a good back could dig up whole pounds of the stuff in creek beds (it looks like thick mud). In just hours, a farmer could earn twenty times what his neighbor did all year, and as profits swelled, men abandoned their farms for prospecting. This upset Congo’s already shaky food supply, and people began hunting gorillas for meat, virtually wiping them out, as if they were so many buffalo. But gorilla deaths were nothing compared to the human atrocities. It’s not a good thing when money pours into a country with no government.
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Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
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Description: pale gold or white scales the color of desert sand; poisonous barbed tail; forked black tongues Abilities: can survive a long time without water, poison enemies with the tips of their tails like scorpions, bury themselves for camouflage in the desert sand, breathe fire Queen: Since the death of Queen Oasis, the tribe is split between three rivals for the throne: sisters Burn, Blister, and Blaze. Alliances: Burn fights alongside SkyWings and MudWings; Blister is allied with the SeaWings; and Blaze has the support of most SandWings as well as an alliance with the IceWings.
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Tui T. Sutherland (The Lost Heir (Wings of Fire, #2))
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, the mainstream world seemed like a constant sensory assault. The notion that the cure for the most disabling aspects of autism will never be found in a pill, but in supportive communities, is one that parents have been coming to on their own for generations.
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Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
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As of 2015 only a dozen of the then 567 federally recognized tribal nations recognize same-sex marriage...Other tribes, however, have explicitly restricted same-sex marriage (all following the passage of DOMA), including the Navajo Nation, Cherokee Nation, Muscogee Nation, Chickasaw Nation, and Iowa Tribe. Although Congress could pass a statute that affects Indian Country Lindsay Roberson...considers it highly unlikely, given the federal government's relatively hands-off support for tribal governance.
Within the Navajo context, this issue has brought about deep debate about the nature of tradition. Joanne Barker has written about the battles over same-sex marriage in Navajo Nation (as well as Cherokee Nation). She documents how the tribal legislation bans and defense of them affirm the discourses of U.S. nationalism, especially in their Christian and right-wing conservative forms. IN these cases, the tribal nation's exercise of sovereignty and self-determination replicates the relations of domination and dispossession that resemble the U.S. treatment of Native Peoples.
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J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism)
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In traditional performance management models, working teams present to leadership in performative, high-stakes monthly or quarterly reviews. By keeping these reviews on such an infrequent cadence, both sides can lose sight of what the real purpose of the review is: to support and sustain the work, and to ensure that everyone is moving together toward the desired results. Such an approach is ill-suited to the ecosystem economy. When you have agile tribes, chapters, and squads working on dynamic, cross-sectoral value propositions, you need to push your performance management process toward a much more frequent operating cadence.
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Venkat Atluri (The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders)
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Our life experiences are more enjoyable when people decide to sing deep roots into our lives and stay for the long haul.
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Leah J.M. Dean (Assemble the Tribe: Believe in Your Value. Find Belonging. Be Different.)
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Those who champion a so-called Independent America will tell you that drones create more enemies than they kill, and that America will attract more admirers by perfecting American democracy. Do you really believe that young men living among the tribes of the Afghan-Pakistan border are less likely to support extremist ideologies if we build better schools in Ohio and better hospitals in Arkansas? Do you accept that Somali jihadis are less likely to plan attacks on Western targets or that U.S. embassies around the world will be safer if U.S. policymakers redouble their commitment to American civil liberties? In the real world, a leader must often choose the least bad of many bad options. Drones achieve military objectives with much less risk for our military and at much lower cost to our economy. Use them. Never
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Ian Bremmer (Superpower: Three Choices for America's Role in the World)
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[Narratives] serve as powerful tools for high-level neural network integration. The combination of linear storyline and visual imagery woven together with verbal and nonverbal expressions of emotion activates and utilizes dedicated circuitry of both left and right hemispheres, cortical and subcortical networks, the various regions of the frontal lobes, and the hippocampus and amygdala. The cooperative and interactive activation involved in stories may be precisely what is required for scultpting and maintaining neural network integration while allowing us to combine sensations, feelings, and behaviors with conscious awareness. Further, stories link individuals into families, tribes, and nations and into a group mind linking each individual brain. It is likely that our brains have been able to become as complex as they are precisely because of the power of narratives and the group to support neural integration
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Louis Cozolino (The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
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but to fight for the British, who had stirred up the Arabs against the Turks in the First World War when they had their eyes set on Musul and Kerkük, was too much to expect. At the same time, other European countries, for their own reasons, had supported various Middle Eastern tribes who were seeking independence.
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Ayşe Kulin (Last Train to Istanbul)
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Perhaps you have understood something of what I wished to have given you. That is, serenity, in every aspect of your work, in your profession, your poetry, and confidence in life, because it is so beautiful! Understand that to me each of us has a divine particle! By not supporting one another, by our impatience, and by bourgeois egoism we construct walls between brothers. Each in his nest, in his tribe, in his country, builds a small fortress. Then you look up at the heavens full of stars and realize that each of us on this small patch of earth is insignificant. For there are so many other planets . . .
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Balasa Cantacuzinos
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The Safavids were either of Kurdish or Turkish origin. In the late thirteenth century, a member of the Safavid family founded a Sunni Sufi religious brotherhood in Azerbaijan, the Turkish-speaking region of northwestern Iran. The brotherhood attracted an ardent following among the Turkish pastoral tribes of the area, and by the late fifteenth century its influence had expanded into Anatolia and Syria. The heads of the brotherhood led the tribes in a series of expeditions against the Christians of the Caucasus, thereby acquiring temporal power as well as enhancing their reputations as servants of Islam. Their Turkish followers were known as Qizilbash, the Redheaded Ones, after the red headgear they wore to identify themselves as supporters of the Safavid brotherhood.
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William L. Cleveland (A History of the Modern Middle East)
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Shibboleths illustrate a more general point about tribalism, which is that arbitrary differences can serve a nonarbitrary function. Gileadites’ pronunciation doesn’t matter per se. What matters is that Gileadites pronounce things differently from Ephraimites. In the same way, arbitrary cultural practices may play a vital role in supporting cooperation. How people dress, wash, eat, work, dance, sing, joke, court, have sex, et cetera—all the rules that govern daily life—can serve the nonarbitrary function of making strangers seem strange, thus separating Us from Them. In
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Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them)
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accepting “They are just not your tribe.” Your tribe will love and support you, and be there when you need them. So many things were starting to
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June Matthews (The Reliving: A True Story (The Paranormal Is Real))
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Just like the body responds with sore muscles when we add mileage, the initial discomfort felt when we listen to the Voice Inside reflects growth. The good news: anxiety initially triggered by listening to our inner dialogue is short-term vs. the unnamed, interminable dread that piggybacks suppression. Even better, we can manage it with self-talk, deep breathing (inherent to running), the Tribe and social support.
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Gina Greenlee (The Whole Person Guide to Your First Marathon: A Mind Body Spirit Companion)
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So widespread was slaveholding among Native Americans that when the Civil War broke out, southern tribes almost universally supported the Confederacy. To be sure, they had no good reason to side with the government that had oppressed them for decades. But their reasoning went well beyond revenge: “Our geographical position, our social and domestic institutions, our feelings and sympathies, all attach us to our Southern friends,” the Chickasaw Nation declared. “As a Southern people we consider their cause our own.”22 Free black slaveholders
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James Oakes (The Ruling Race)
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Just for a minute shift your perspective and picture your family as a sacred tribe. Think of your loved ones as a carefully chosen collective of souls who have joined — not by accident, but intentionally — for an important reason: to support one another’s collective growth. Does that change how you see things and how you relate to them?
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Renée Peterson Trudeau (Nurturing the Soul of Your Family: 10 Ways to Reconnect and Find Peace in Everyday Life)
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By the end of 2004, U.S. operations in Iraq had been rough enough to antagonize the Sunni population without imposing the draconian methods armies habitually employ to control a population.
In the spring of 2006, the coalition was losing on the two major fronts that accounted for most of the fighting. In Anbar to the west, al Qaeda controlled the population; in Baghdad to the east, Shiite death squads were driving our the sunnis, while al Qaeda's suicide bombings continued.
Yet, the conditions had already been set for a turnaround without precedent in combating an insurgency. In less that three years, two giant institutions steeped in 200 years of traditions-the Army and Marines-adopted new doctrines and turned around a losing war. This was equivalent to GE and Ford starting afresh in new business lines and turning a profit in three years.
A lack of soldiers is frequently cited as the basic flaw after the invasion. This is mistaken. There were 140,000 soldiers, plus 100,000 contractors in support roles, in Iraq in 2003. Adding troops would not have accomplished much because the two-headed command...lacked a plan, a counterinsurgency doctrine, and proper training. With the Pentagon's agreement, Bremer had disbanded the Iraqi Army, and the Iraqi police were ineffective. More American troops operating alone under a doctrine of attack and destroy would have exacerbated the rebellion.
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Bing West (The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq)
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Benjamin Franklin Learned about Democracy by Observing Native Americans One of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, actually spent quite a lot of time observing and socializing with the Iroquois tribe. During his interactions with the Native Americans, Franklin noticed that the Iroquois was in fact, a union of different tribes that were ruled by one chief. Their chief would only remain in power if the other tribes supported his actions, which technically made him an elected official. The Iroquois also had in place a system of checks and balances to make sure that no one abused their authority. Some historians speculate that Franklin introduced many of the things he learned from his interactions with the Native Americans when he and the other Founding Fathers drafted the United States Constitution.
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William D. Willis (American History: US History: An Overview of the Most Important People & Events. The History of United States: From Indians, to "Contemporary" History ... Native Americans, Indians, New York Book 1))
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In our extraordinarily fragmented and stressed society, where parents often face the child-rearing task without the support that the tribe, clan, village, extended family, and community used to provide, misattuned parent–child interactions are increasingly the norm. In
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? If you’re really smart, you’ll drop the drivenness. It doesn’t matter what’s driving you; when you’re driven, you are like a leaf, driven by the wind. You have no real autonomy. You are bound to be blown off course, even if you reach what you believe is your goal. And don’t confuse being driven with being authentically animated by an inner calling. One state leaves you depleted and unfulfilled; the other fuels your soul and makes your heart sing. What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? “Just say no” (to drugs, gambling, eating, sex, etc.) is the least helpful advice one can say to a human being caught up in any addiction. If they could say no, they would. The whole point of addiction is that people are compelled to it by suffering, trauma, unease, and emotional pain. If you want to help people, ask why they are in so much pain that they are driven (there’s that word again) to escape from it through ultimately self-harming habits or substances. Then support them in healing the trauma at the core of their addiction, a process that always starts with nonjudgmental curiosity and compassion.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by? The quote I live by is “By any means necessary.” It’s from Malcolm X. When I was in college, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and was blown away by the determination and commitment that Malcolm X had to his people and to fight against a system that was not designed to support or help him or his people. He really made strides in bringing civil rights to the forefront of the American people. It was a very moving book, and I remember reading it a few times. As I started my label, I wanted to create a slogan with this concept, and I wanted to use this idea of “by any means necessary” as a way of life. When we started [my label] Dim Mak back in 1996, I didn’t have any money to launch the label, as I only had $ 400 to my name. So I would find any way possible to make sure these records came out. I did whatever I could with the tools in front of me with no excuses and no complaining. You gotta find a way to get your project done; you gotta think outside the box. My team also lives and works by the mantra of “by any means necessary,” and because of that, we can get things done that others might not. I feel lucky to have such a great team that will share this way of life with me.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? The biggest one is that international audiences won’t see films about people of color. It’s particularly insidious, but it’s reflective of a broader issue wherein Hollywood accepts conventional wisdom that is more convention than wisdom without interrogating whether there’s any evidence to support those assumptions. What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Try everything you think you might want to do professionally before accepting whatever backup plan you have in the back of your head but are very much hoping to avoid.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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At length, one of those low murmurs that are so apt to disturb a multitude, was heard, and the whole nation arose to their feet by a common impulse. At that the door of the lodge in question opened, and three men, issuing from it, slowly approached the place of consultation. They were all aged, even beyond that period to which the oldest present had reached; but one in the centre, who leaned on his companions for support, had numbered an amount of years to which the human race is seldom permitted to attain. His frame, which had once been tall and erect, like the cedar, was now bending under the pressure of more than a century. The elastic, light step of an Indian was gone, and in its place he was compelled to toil his tardy way over the ground, inch by inch. His dark, wrinkled countenance was in singular and wild contrast with the long white locks which floated on his shoulders in such thickness as to announce that generations had probably passed away since they had last been shorn. The dress of this patriarch — for such, considering his vast age, in conjunction with his affinity and influence with his people, he might very properly be termed — was rich and imposing, though strictly after the simple fashions of the tribe. His robe was of the finest skins, which had been deprived of their fur, in order to admit of a hieroglyphical representation of various deeds in arms, done in former ages. His bosom was loaded with medals, some in massive silver, and one or two even in gold, the gifts of various Christian potentates during the long period of his life. He also wore armlets, and cinctures above the ankles, of the latter precious metal. His head, on the whole of which the hair had been permitted to grow, the pursuits of war having so long been abandoned, was encircled by a sort of plated diadem, which, in its turn, bore lesser and more glittering ornaments, that sparkled amid the glossy hues of three drooping ostrich feathers, dyed a deep black, in touching contrast to the color of his snow-white locks. His tomahawk was nearly hid in silver, and the handle of his knife shone like a horn of solid gold. So soon as the first hum of emotion and pleasure, which the sudden appearance of this venerated individual created, had a little subsided, the name of “Tamenund” was whispered from mouth to mouth.
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Book House (100 Books You Must Read Before You Die - volume 1 [newly updated] [Pride and Prejudice; Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; Tarzan of the Apes; The Count of ... (The Greatest Writers of All Time))
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The rest of section eight lays out the other things that Congress is allowed to do. The list is pretty extensive, so we will hit the high points. - Borrow money. - Regulate trade between other countries, between the states, and between Indian tribes. - Develop rules for Naturalization. - Print money and provide punishment for printing fake money. - Establish a post office. - Promote the progress of science and useful arts. - Set up federal courts that are subordinate to the Supreme Court. - Punish Pirates and other offenses committed on the high Seas. - Declare war. - Raise and support an Army and Navy as well as make the rules for governing them. - Call up the Militia to execute laws, quell an uprising, or repel a foreign invasion. - Provide a system for States to man, equip, and train their own Militias. - Allow the Federal government to buy land to set up government buildings, forts, docks, etc.
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John Vandusen (Blueprint of Freedom: Simplified Guide to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution)
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Introverts and loners, know that genuine relationships and real support do in fact exist. Do not give up on your desire to meet your Soul Tribe. They are manifesting you as well.
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Robin S. Baker
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People don’t like a host of options.” Kerrol held up two fingers. “No matter how nuanced debate might be at the start, if lots of people are involved then it ultimately condenses around two poles deemed to be irreconcilable. And then you have your war. Which in and of itself is an argument against the library. When evolution has shaped us to tribalism, how can we be trusted with the means to reduce tribes to dust?” “That sounds insane,” Evar said. “Not really. If you pick the solution you think is best out of a host of possibilities then everyone is going to have a slightly different answer to the problem. You need support, so you accept a few small changes and move to someone else’s solution. Now there are two of you behind one idea. You need more. The process repeats and repeats. You see people coalescing behind an idea you hate, and it becomes more important to be lined up behind something vaguely palatable that has the numbers to oppose them than it does to get exactly the solution you wanted. In the end there are two solutions, aligned against each other. And in the library’s case, two ideologies and an uneasy truce.
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Mark Lawrence (The Book That Broke the World (The Library Trilogy, #2))
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I’ll be here for you no matter what.” It’s probably this support that’s made me feel like there’s nothing in the world that’s impossible. You just have to dare to do it. If you dare, then you have already gotten further ahead than 99 percent of all the others.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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Abdulaziz responded by calling his third national conference in less than a year. The meeting was held in September 1929 at Ash Sha’ra between Riyadh and Mecca, and this time it was decisive. The king sought and received firm public support for harsh retribution against Daweesh and his followers. The resolution stated that those who revolted would now be tried and punished as common criminals according to Islamic law for the deaths they had caused. Anyone giving them aid would have their property confiscated.26 Those living in the “corrupted” Ikhwan camps would be evicted. This was the turning point in Saudi Arabian history that established the supremacy of the central government over the tribes. Those who supported the old ways were now outlaws, not holy warriors. Nothing like this had ever happened in Arabia before—and still has not happened in either Yemen or Afghanistan.
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David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
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Saleh had his own battles to fight, most notably with a rebellious group called Ansar Allah (“Supporters of God”). Its base were the Zaydi tribes in the rugged mountains of northwest Yemen (with some spillover into the very south of Saudi Arabia). The Zaydis represent about 40 percent of the Muslim population of Yemen. They are considered close to Shia, though with doctrines different from those of Iran, and with some affinities to Sunni.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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We prefer our tribes to the others. We believe in the superiority of our tribe, and we push back against those who threaten our group. Our tribes give us a sense of belonging, cooperation, purpose, comfort, and support. We nurture our tribes with myths and morals, facts and fictions, to bind ourselves to one another.
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Tom C.W. Lin (The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change)
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Whilst parenthood will always have challenging moments, days and periods which can feel extremely exhausting, isolating, lonely and the compelling need to be seen, held and supported from your tribe…for example home schooling during Covid lockdown with two or three children at home, it is normal and natural to feel the frustration and stress. We are humans at the end of the day and our children do test the patience of anyone especially with being in confined spaces, financial stress, when they are fighting or there is constant noise and mess…not to mention throwing in illness to an already exhausting day! It is no wonder that it takes a village to raise a child. However, I still do feel that this is manageable when your brain biochemistry is balanced. One can draw on the inner resilience to get through the chaos that is, but with imbalanced biochemistry with PND it can be enough to make you feel like you cannot go on.
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Namita Mahanama
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When you lift your voices up to pray with this sacred pipe, your prayers will be supported by all the peoples of your Mother Earth praying along with you, as well as everything within this universe that is also praying with you. Believe that this is so and you will always receive direct knowledge from the Great Spirit. Chanunpa is a manifestation of the covenant that you have entered into with life: to pray for and with everything for the glory of Wakan Tanka’s creation to increase in all ways.
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Kaia Ra (The Sophia Code: A Living Transmission from The Sophia Dragon Tribe)
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And once your liberation is final, you will land in the comfort of those who will identify with your vulnerability in a matured and responsible manner. You will meet a tribe of individuals who will not be afraid to feel some discomfort because of your state.
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Mitta Xinindlu
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Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing in what everyone says. Not having absolute faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers. We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe. The centuries in which people had faith in what they believed were the centuries in which little new was learned. Had they trusted the knowledge of their fathers, Einstein, Newton, and Copernicus would never have called things into question and would never have been able to move our knowledge forward. If no one had raised doubts, we would be still worshipping pharaohs and thinking that Earth is supported on the back of a giant turtle.
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Carlo Rovelli (Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity)